New People (Senna) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for New People … than take off on your own:

1. How would you describe Maria Pierce? As her mother observed of her twenty-odd years ago, while Maria was still in her crib, "She's perfectly cheerful, but I sense a coldness." Is that an accurate prediction of her 27 years later? What other characteristics do you find in her? Do you find her a sympathetic character? Does your attitude toward her change over the course of the novel? 

2. Khalil, Maria's fiance, is the love of her life. Or is he? "He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her." What does that sentence mean … and what might the words (especially the last two, "repair her") harbinger for their relationship?

3. Maria and Khalil are named the Prom King and Queen Racially Nebulous Prom. Care to comment?

4. Talk about Maria's attraction to the tall, black poet. What is the pull he exudes toward her? Is it, as she herself wonders, the desire for "authenticity" or for something "real" that she's not finding in her own life? And why is he unnamed — why only ever referred to as "the poet"?

5. What do you think of the students at Stanford, their "Recovering Racist" pins and lobbing off their "colonized hair." How would you describe those gestures: genuinely supportive, empty, kind-hearted, over-the-top?

6. Discuss the racist phone prank Maria plays on Khalil and its repercussions.

7. What is the state of race relations in society at the time of this book? Are racial identity and acceptance in the '90s different from how they are today? Consider, for example, the white woman who mistakes Maria for her nanny. Funny? Maddening?

8. Maria's Ph.D. dissertation is on the Jonestown Massacre. What do you know about that event? And what does that event  — its rhetoric of racial liberation and left-wing politics — have to do with the overall thematic concerns of Danzy Senna's novel?

9. Talk about the way in which the novel ends — with Maria left in a precarious position. Are you satisfied with that ending, or would you have preferred a different one?

10. Discuss the title of the book. What does it mean to be "new people"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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